Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: How does a movement build support when large parts of the country are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree with you?  For some answers we’ll turn to long-time organizer Michael Ansara — his new book is The Hard Work of Hope. But first: a searing federal court ruling in Los Angeles blocking ICE from detaining people because they look Latino: Attorney Mark Rosenbaum will explain –in a minute.
[BREAK]
Last Friday, a federal judge halted indiscriminate immigration stops in Los Angeles and Southern California — those roundups of people who looked Latino, who were working at car washes or looking for day laborer jobs outside Home Depots, or just going to swap meets. The judge said picking them up and detaining them for deportation because they looked Latino is racial discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional. For comment, we’re joined now by Mark Rosenbaum. He’s a lawyer with Public Counsel, one of the nonprofit groups that filed and won this suit. Mark, welcome back, and congratulations on this terrific victory.

Mark Rosenbaum: Well, thank you very much. It was an effort that was brought by Public Counsel and the ACLU and two law firms. As you know, it’s hard these days to find law firms that’ll stand up, but Hecker Fink and Munger Tolles did, as well as Immigrant Defenders and CHIRLA, so it’s a victory for them.  But it’s a victory for those car wash workers and the nannies and the day laborers who stood up to the president of the United States and said, ‘you can’t treat us the way you are based on the color of our skin’ — and won.

JW: First tell us about the judge’s order in this case. The LA Times called it ‘a searing ruling against the Trump administration.’

MR: There was actually two TROs the court granted; judge Frimpong granted last Friday. The first was along the lines of what you’re saying. When you think about it, it ought to be pretty modest. What the court said was, look, you can carry out your operations if that’s your prerogative, that’s your priorities, but you cannot exclusively depend on an individual’s skin color, the fact that they appear Latino. You can’t exclusively depend upon the fact that they might be at a bus stop or at a particular location. I mean, my God, there are 5 million Latinos in Los Angeles County and 2 million in the city, and you can’t depend upon the fact of a particular occupation that you think a person has.
The government, as you know, when it announced this siege, said that what they were looking for were killers, rapists, and drug dealers. Well killers, rapists and drug dealers don’t hang out at bus stops.  And it’s really been attack on nannies and on those who work at car washes.
The other part of the order is also significant, and it relates. The court also granted a temporary restraining order because what the federal government was doing was denying access to counsel. It was sweeping up these individuals en masse, taking them to a basement, and I literally mean a basement, which was supposed to be a short-term processing center in downtown Los Angeles, keeping them there as long as 12 days, no beds, no showers, an occasional frozen burrito, water that came from a toilet spigot — and denial of any access to lawyers whatsoever. And the court said, ‘no, you can’t do that.’
And I can tell you one story regarding that. On the June 7th, the government, the federal government was moving some of the detainees out, or all the detainees out of this basement facility, and a ICE driver of a white van was pulling out. There were lawyers who wanted to meet with the detainees who were prevented from doing so, and those lawyers started shouting, ‘you have a right to a lawyer,’ and the response of ICE was to blare the horn so that their voices couldn’t be heard — which tells you that the real fear here is of individuals exercising their rights.

JW: Border czar Tom Homan said in defense of the government position that ‘ICE agents are trained to consider many factors when they stop someone out in public. They don’t just rely on their appearance.’ Why did the judge reject that argument?

MR: Because that turned out to be a lie. Whatever their training is in the classes that they take, or in the manuals that they receive, that’s very clearly not what was happening on the street. We documented instance after instance of ICE agents coming to some of the places we’re talking about, surrounding the place, and then systematically detaining and arresting individuals on no other information, based on the skin color.
We asked the government, and the judge asked the government, do you have any arrest records that demonstrate that in fact you were relying on other factors? The government said it didn’t have any available. We fortunately had one on one of the plaintiffs and all it showed was that they were focusing upon the fact that the individual was a Latino. There’s more particularized information on a speeding ticket that you get that ties you to speeding than anything that ICE was able to provide.
So it’s just a lie, in the same way that the government came in here and said, ‘we’re interested in public safety,’ and in fact they’re interested in nannies and car wash workers.

JW: The big question, of course, is has ICE been following this order? Have they stopped indiscriminate roundups of people who look Latino?

MR: That’s a really important question. Of course, that’s what it’s about. We have done some monitoring since for the order came down on Friday. It appears that there has been major reduction in the raids and some of the abuses we’re talking about.  Not a hundred percent. We documented, for example, this past Sunday that lawyers were unable to bring even medical supplies or talk individuals in this basement facility. But I think the general agreement is that the court’s order has made a difference and we’re going to continue to pursue it and we’ll pursue a preliminary injunction as well.

JW: What is ICE allowed to do? What are the grounds for reasonable suspicion that someone is undocumented and should be deported?

MR: Well, it’s pretty simple and it’s not any different than the sort of standards that apply to police departments or county sheriff departments. This is something that anybody watches Law and Order that knows those tests. The first thing that they’re supposed to do, as the Supreme Court has said, is the preferred method, is to get warrants. A warrant means that an individual’s name appears on it, there’s been particularized information. There are individual overstays of their visas, or an individual is involved in a criminal matter, a serious criminal matter, and their name comes to the attention of ICE. So they say, we’ve got particularized information about this individual. Short of that, if an individual is identified, not after they’re detained but prior to detained, so for example, the courts have said, if an individual is wholly unable to speak any English, that might be a factor. And there are other sorts of actions. Somebody reports, ‘look, I have information that my neighbor is not here with legal status,’ that sort of information. 
But that’s not what’s taken place here. These are roving, as the court said, these are roving patrols that look for large gatherings of Latinos and go after them, and they’re using race as a proxy for criminal behavior.

JW: I noticed that Trump’s immigration guru, Steven Miller, has commented on this: “A communist judge in LA,” Steven Miller wrote, “has ordered ICE to report directly to her and to radical left NGOs, not to the president. This is another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people.” Steven Miller. I wonder if you have any comment on that.

MR: Well, that’s really serious business. Miller is clearly the ringmaster for this operation and for all these operations. He set a quota of some 2,000 arrests a day nationwide. It’s very clear that that’s what was being sought to be achieved in this situation. He talked about ‘stretching out’ ‘using creativity.’ 
And when you read the order itself, it’s an enormous, it’s a historic victory, but the order is so modest. It simply says, as we’ve been talking, you can’t racially profile. So if Steven Miller thinks that’s communism, someone better explain to him the difference between communism and democracy.

JW: You said there were two parts, two different restraining orders. The government is appealing the first part about racial profiling. They’re not appealing the part about access to lawyers.  What that tell you?

MR: It tells you that this judge, whom they’re name calling and whom they say had no idea about the constitution, they’re acknowledging that that judge got it right. Everybody in this country knows that the federal government isn’t shy about appealing orders from district courts, that hold them accountable, but they’re not doing it with respect to the access to lawyer part. And that means they know that the judge got it right and they don’t want to bring those facts to the attention of the court.
I mean, those facts, those facts are of a dungeon, and I’m not hyperbolic on this. It is a dungeon like facility. It was meant for short-term processing. The individuals in that facility, the evidence was undisputed. Besides the fact that they don’t have the beds and they don’t have showers and they don’t get regular meals by any stretch while they’re held as long as a week and a half.
At the same time, there’s not a confidential telephone in that location. Not one. They were crowded into cell blocks, 60 to a cell block meant to maybe hold five at max. There were hundreds in there.
And so when the government says, we’re not appealing it, the government knows that they’ve got a loser, and you’ve got a federal judge who’s paying attention to the rules of the game, which we call the constitution. This means, I think, that the rule of law is back in Los Angeles.

JW: You’ve told us the groups that were allied with Public Counsel and the ACLU of Southern California in bringing this suit. But I understand that some other entities joined this lawsuit. Who were they?

MR: The city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, A number of other cities, the neighboring cities, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, I understand, six or seven other cities have joined and sought to intervene in the case. And one of the standards for a legal matter of this is ‘how is the public interest best served?’ And what these cities and what the county of Los Angeles has said is, ‘you’re destroying our economy. These are gross abuses. You’re running in a Mid-City park, MacArthur Park, a military show, armed vehicles, military with weapons on horseback.’ And what the cities are saying and standing side by side with these workers is ‘no, these workers are part of our community. These workers make the economy go in our community,’ and they have sought to intervene, and they have filed a brief, as has the state of California. And in my experience of 15 one years litigating, I’m not aware of a case where at a district court level, residents communities have been joined by cities, have been joined by a state to say that federal government stay out of here. ‘You’re doing US harm. You said you were supposed to address the issue of public safety. You’re making the public safety much worse. You are bullying individuals who are not a threat to the public and you’re ignoring the constitution.’ And so I said, that’s a first in my experience.

JW: And what is the schedule now on the government’s appeal?

MR: Well, we’ll see. As you noted, the government is appealing one, but not both of the TROs. It has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a stay. The Ninth Circuit initially has denied that stay because the federal government didn’t follow the right procedures. Government has refiled its petition for a stay. We’ll see what happens. But they have noticed an appeal and we’re eager to get a hearing on what should be fundamental basic constitutional values as to how the federal government’s supposed to proceed.
And there’s one other thing here. So they’ve singled out Los Angeles. Los Angeles is ground zero as part of California. You don’t see this in Texas. You don’t see this in Florida. And so this is clearly part of the revenge tour with a political agenda, nothing to do with public safety or any real national priorities

JW: As a result of the government’s use of racial profiling, there are lots of Latinos who’ve been afraid to leave their homes, especially if they’re undocumented, but including many legal residents, including many citizens. They’ve been afraid to go to church. They’ve been afraid to go do the grocery shopping. They’ve been afraid to take their kids to school. Now that you’ve won this injunction prohibiting ICE from detaining people because they look Latino, now, do you think these people are safe to go out? Can they go to school? Can they go to church? Can they do the shopping?

MR: That’s a really important question, isn’t it? Regarding the citizens — uou’re right. Some of the plaintiffs, in our case, were citizens. There are multiple reports of citizens carrying around passports because of the fear that you’re talking about. I mean, we have citizens who were thrown to the ground when they asserted that they were a citizen.
Do I think the fear has disappeared? No. This was a campaign to terrorize, to treat these individuals as if they’re domestic terrorists. Do I think that peace and tranquility has returned to Los Angeles? No. And as long as ICE is running the streets and carrying on these sieges and treating individuals based on racial profiling, nobody with any good sense would say, all is safe here and all is secure. But that’s the intent, isn’t it, to try to terrorize the community.

JW: One last thing — the big picture of taking Trump to court and trying to get the courts to stop Trump, A lot of our friends say, ‘that doesn’t work, even though what he’s doing is illegal and unconstitutional, the courts support Trump, especially the Supreme Court. So it’s a mistake to believe the courts will stop him.’ But it seems like you and your allies have stopped them, at least for now, at least in the streets of LA and Southern California. What do you think about this larger argument about whether the courts will stop him?

MR: Well, I don’t think we stopped him. I think, look, we’re really good lawyers, I don’t want to downplay what we’ve done.  But we won because of the fact that the individuals who were singled out stood up to the president of the United States and to the Steven Millers.
I get asked that question a lot, and you know me, I’m certainly not an apologist for some of the injustices that come out of the judicial branch.  But my God, this is as basic as it gets. If the courts won’t enforce the fact that individuals should not be racially profiled, should not be singled out based on the race — I don’t think we’re at that stage yet. And I don’t think that’s a matter of political ideology, judicial bias, or anything like that. I think we’re going to continue to win this.

JW: “We will continue to win this” — Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel. Mark, thanks for all your work on this, and thanks for talking with us today.

MR: Thanks for your interest.

JW: One update: Last week, the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to stay the judge’s order, which would allow immigration agents resume detaining people who look Latino. The appeals court will take up the stay next Monday and could rule on it by the end of the month.
[BREAK]

Jon Wiener: How does a movement build support when large parts of the country are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree with you? For some answers, we turn to longtime organizer Michael Ansara. Michael helped build Mass Fair Share – a pioneering, multiracial economic justice organization – in the eighties. Before that, he was a leader of the anti-war movement in the Boston area, and a leader of the Harvard Student Strike in the sixties. His new book is The Hard Work of Hope. We reached him today in Carlisle, Mass. Michael Ansara, welcome to the program.

Michael Ansara: Thank you so much, Jon. It’s a delight to be here talking with you.

JW: First of all, I want to thank you. You organized tens of thousands of people into, first, anti-war work, and then social justice groups. I was one of them. In the late sixties, you recruited me, first to do research for Ramparts Magazine, and then to write for The Old Mole, the underground paper of Cambridge, Mass. I’ve been researching and writing for publications on the left ever since — so thank you for that.

MA: You’re more than welcome.

JW: The key part of your new book for me was your account of how you and your colleagues didn’t just organize people on the left into activist work. You spent endless hours working to persuade people who did not agree with us, to persuade them to join us. For starters, you organized across colleges in New England telling people about the first national march against the war in Vietnam, organized by SDS, Students for Democratic Society. The march finally took place April 17th, 1965. What was that work like?

MA: You have to remember, in late ‘64, early 1965, the country was unified in its support for the war in Vietnam. And that was true on most campuses. It was true the editorial boards of every newspaper.  All but two senators were behind the war.  And so we had to educate and organize and convince.
But the way we did that, remember we’re 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, talking to kids of the same age, and you weren’t selling something. You couldn’t come into a dorm room, meet with 15 or 20 people and say, ‘I’m here to tell you that you’ve got to be against the war.’ You had to come in and say, ‘I’d like to talk to you about the war, but first I’d like to talk a little bit about who we all are. What are you thinking about?’ And of course, what we were thinking about was ‘who are we going to be? What kind of jobs?’ And ‘what about the Civil Rights movement?’ And we’d be in these free-flowing conversations where you’d really connect with people, and we’d bring it back often to the war and the history of the war and the history of Vietnam and the lies of the Johnson administration.
But we never convinced anyone in one conversation. It’d be like they’d think about it, and then there’d be a demonstration and they’d say, ‘I’m not sure that was right.’ And so after every demonstration, we had to have a conversation. And slowly and steadily, more people learning about the war would agree with us. And then they’d take a first step. It might be, ‘okay, I’ll sign a petition.’ ‘Okay, I’ll wear a peace button,’ something easy. And then it might be, ‘okay, I’ll join that March.’ ‘Okay, I’ll get on the bus to Washington for another national demonstration.’ And then they were part of the movement, and they were part of a community.
The only way you build a movement is by engagement. And the only way you do that effectively is to connect with people and talk about what’s on their minds, not just what’s on yours.

JW: It seems like you were always a radical, but how did you get into movement politics in the first place?

MA: Well, I’m sure some of it goes back to my parents. I grew up in a very strange household. We had a lot of books and no money, and I would learn late as a teenager that my parents had both been communists in the 1930s.

JW: Lemme just establish here, although you were a famous Harvard student, I think your father was not an investment banker or a corporate lawyer.

MA: [Laughter] No. Well, he had gone to Harvard, but he ended up as a taxi driver.
He had gone into the government in the Second World War, and in 1947, the year that I was born, he was, along with nine others, fired as security risks — and ended up driving cab in Boston. Was a terrible cab driver, didn’t want to do it, didn’t do it well, didn’t make any money.
But they had clearly imparted values. I don’t remember a lot of political conversations around the dinner table.
But one day in 1960, I was 13 years old, and I walked by a Woolworths store. This is in Brookline, Massachusetts, and there was a small picket line, and I engaged one of the kids on the picket line, and he explained that they were marching in support of Black people who are sitting in, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Black students who were trying to get a cup of coffee. And I just thought, “well, yes, of course,” and I stepped into the picket line.  And I have to say that really changed my life. I was swept up in the early civil rights movement, and it just transformed me. That’s where I first understood what organizing was. That’s where I first got a glimpse of what people could do and that people could change. And I quickly wanted to become an organizer too.

JW: Yeah, that’s the key here. I think you weren’t just a person with radical ideas. You weren’t just an activist who would join a picket line. You got the idea that you should be an organizer. That is something very special. Where did you get that idea?

MA: I would trace it back to a very specific experience in 1962. I’m in Boston and I’m adopted by an amazing group of Black organizers. To this day, I don’t understand why they were so generous and adopted this acne-speckled, naive, 15-year-old kid.  But they did.  
They organized something called the Boston Action Group, and they decided to use the economic power of the Black community to really make a change in the employment discrimination. Now, you have to remember, in 1962 in Boston, there was not a single law firm that had a Black senior partner. There was not a single bank that had a Black senior manager. Black construction workers were excluded from the building trades. I could go on and on and on. So they did a survey and I was part of this. We went door to door and asked Black families in Roxbury and Dorchester what they bought.
And we looked at it and we looked at it and we settled on Wonder Bread, the ubiquitous white bread manufactured by the Continental Baking Company, which had a factory in the middle of Roxbury, in the middle of the Black community, and refused to hire Black people for anything other than the most menial janitorial jobs. So we built an organization that had block captains on virtually every block where Black people lived. We recruited the African American ministers of all the Black churches, and we launched a boycott of Wonder Bread, and we won. They ended up giving in, it was weeks and weeks, but they gave in.
And that I saw, okay, that’s organizing, that’s building an organization that can win, and that’s getting ordinary people to step out of their daily life and do something really extraordinary. We actually loosened the grip of racism. And by the way, right after that, at the nearest hint of boycotts, Boston’s banks started hiring Black people for senior managers, colleges, and universities started hiring Black people for deans. I mean, you could just see the change. And that just convinced me, one, that organizing works, and two, that people can do remarkable things when they connect and act collectively.

JW: We have to talk about Harvard, Harvard Students for Democratic Society, and we have to talk about the Harvard strike, April 9th, 1969. One of the high points of my life.  We organized toward it that whole year. First, explain what the issues were in 1969, starting in the fall,

MA: The overwhelming issue was the war in Vietnam. On most college campuses at that time, there was something called the Reserve Officer Training Corps, ROTC, which was preparing college students to be officers in the military. 
But also the Black struggle had spread to college campuses, and in campus after campus, there were the demands for African American studies department, and Harvard was, ‘Nope, we don’t need to do that. No way.’
And then Harvard owns enormous property, not just in Cambridge, but also in Boston around the medical schools and the teaching hospitals. And it was a terrible landlord.
And so the core demands, starting with ROTC, was that Harvard should abolish ROTC, but should keep giving the scholarships to the students who were in ROTC. Harvard should establish an African American studies department.  And Harvard should be a true community partner and a better landlord.

JW: The climactic moment came when radical students from SDS occupied the administration building in Harvard Yard — University Hall. Your book reminded me of how close the whole thing came, not just to failure, but to disaster.

MA: The key thing that made the Harvard strike happen was the stupidity of the Harvard administration. Every college administration knew that there was a good chance that there would be a building occupation coming on the heels of the Columbia uprising the year before. And the Harvard study, they commissioned some firm to study what happened at Columbia. And the conclusion was the Columbia deans were too slow to call in the police.
I firmly believe that if they had just let us stay in the building, everything would’ve petered out. The overwhelming sense of Harvard students was that they were against the war, but they weren’t for seizing a building. There were probably a thousand out of the 15,000, 16,000 students at Harvard who really were excited about seizing the building.
In the early morning. They unleashed both the Cambridge police and state police to get us out of the building by force. And I think they should —

JW: And lemme just set the scene here. The building is in Harvard Yard surrounded by the dorms — full of, at this point, sleeping boys.

MA: Right. And so the police charge in. And I think Harvard, of course, didn’t anticipate and didn’t understand, that the police came in with generations of resentment. I mean, think about the Cambridge police. They would die to have one of their kids come to Harvard. And here we are in their minds, throwing it away.  Also, a lot of them are Vietnam vets who believed that their sacrifice had to be justified. And  also, a lot of them were Irish from Irish blue-collar families who remembered ‘Irish need not apply,’ including at Harvard.
So they came in with enormous resentment and they let kids have it, not just those of us who were in the building, but anyone who came in sight. And of course, with all the noise and the commotion, all the kids in the dorms poured into Harvard Yard to see what would happen.
And what they saw was a shocking sight to them. They saw white elite students being beaten by cops, and they couldn’t believe it.
And so the result was that all those years of organizing and talking and connecting, all of a sudden everything crystallized for thousands of Harvard students, and their animosity towards the administration ratcheted up. Their disgust with the war absolutely drove them to say, ‘we have to do something.’  You had medical students, law students, business school, design students, teaching fellows all supported it. We had huge rallies in Harvard Stadium.
And then, here’s the amazing thing. There is a wonderful tape recording of Hugh Calkins, one of the leading members of the Harvard Corporation, three or four weeks after the strike had begun, absolutely conceding. And he just goes through, ‘yes, we are abolishing ROTC. Yes, we are keeping the scholarships for the kids. Yes, we are forming an African American studies department. Yes, we pledge to be a better community partner and to improve the buildings that we own. Yes.’ I mean, it was as close to a complete surrender as I’ve ever heard.
And the thing also is that because it was Harvard, it was national and international news. And because it was Harvard, all the Harvard folks think it was unique. But this was just part of what was sweeping across American campuses in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. And it was galvanized by the war but had become something much larger.

JW: And then, just as the student movement nationally was reaching its peak, SDS, just a few months after the Harvard strike, held its national convention in Chicago. You went.  It was a complete disaster. Everything fell apart. What is your analysis today of what we did wrong with SDS?

MA: Part of it is I think our youth, both our chronological youth and our political youth, and the experience for a number of years of being the only people trying to stop the war – that had a profound impact on us. By 1969, many of us had decided that America was an irredeemable country. The history of genocide against the indigenous population, the history of racism and slavery from its inception, the imperial adventures all over the world, the overthrow of democratic elected governments all over the world.

JW: And the fact that the Vietnam War was still going, even though so many hundreds of thousands of us had demonstrated against it.

MA: Absolutely. And so what formed was both a desperation and this view that the country was irredeemable. Well, if the country is irredeemable, then it’s revolution or nothing. And not simply campaigning to end the war and simply campaigning for significant reforms. We were unable to see that as a possibility — because the country was irredeemable. We were for revolution in a period that was completely bizarre in which the unexpected was happening every other day, in which anything seemed possible. I mean, just think about what happened in 1968 — from Johnson’s decision not to run, the thought that there’re going to be peace negotiations, maybe it’ll end, starting of course with the Tet offensive, so bloody and prolonged.
And then the assassination of Martin Luther King, and every Black community across the country, rioting and occupied by National Guard troops. And then the Prague Spring and the Columbia uprising and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and then the Democratic Convention, the repression, and the Paris students, and the German students, the Mexican students and the Mexican students get massacred, everything seemed possible. And we would swing wildly from hope to despair, to hope, to despair, and anything seemed possible. Of course, anything is never possible. There are always historical limits, and we couldn’t read them.
And so the moment when we should have pivoted and aspired to a majoritarian movement, we were unable to do that. And we became enmeshed in a politics of purity and outdoing each other. And suddenly the New Left, which had been born out of our attempt to create a left that was American in its language, in its ideas, a left that was freed from the baggage of the old left, became a sad mimicry of the old left.
So I was in Chicago and I was just completely dumbfounded. I saw my home for the last five years, my political home, simply disappear.
But I think it was that evolution and all of the enormous pressure of getting up every day and saying, ‘if I’m not good enough, more people will die. More people will die in Vietnam. More people will die in Black communities across America. I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to find a way.’ And that pressure day after day, I believe just drove a lot of us crazy.

JW: The anti-war movement continued without SDS. And then the war ended in 1975. This was 10 years after that first SDS anti-war march on Washington.
By that time, a lot of our friends had given up on politics. You decided to do something about what we had learned about our mistakes, and one of the most important things you decided was to get off campus and go “into the community.” And you really did it. You organized a group called Mass Fair Share.  By its peak around in the early eighties, you had a hundred paid staff. You had a door to door canvassing operation with 300 canvassers who knocked on something like 400,000 doors a year. You had an annual budget of $3 million.  That’s even bigger than Harvard SDS. How did you figure out how to do all this?

MA: It was a fumbling path.  We began to organize around economic issues. And our first foray was an organizing effort around the high price of energy in 1973, ‘74 and ‘75. And then we also explored how we could build a Boston organization rooted in the neighborhoods coming on the heels of the vicious racism of the anti-busing movement, which was also the anti-busing movement was also extremely populist. It was in many ways a forerunner for the MAGA movement today, vitriolic, and violent.
And so the question we posed, could we organize in some of those same communities with an economic populism that was a progressive economic populism? And so we started all of this. And in the spring of 1975, we applied to, this is unthinkable in today’s time, but we applied to the Catholic Church, the Campaign for Human Development, which funded social justice things. And we didn’t know that we were one of two groups that had applied for funding to the Campaign for Human Development. The other had grown out of the welfare rights work and the movement for economic justice that Wiley had founded. And the Campaign for Human Development did something quite remarkable. They said, ‘we love these two proposals, but we won’t fund them unless you merge. And if you merge, we will give you’ — what seemed like an astronomical amount of money in those days. I think it was like $150,000. And so with great difficulty, we did bring the two groups together and Mass Fair Share was born. And then we set out to do serious organizing, and we built a remarkable organization, 110,000 families became members. We had—

JW: Let me just emphasize: Black and white together.

MA: Black and white together. And we were dealing with many people who had supported the anti-busing movement, white people who had supported the anti-busing movement. And our pitch to them was, ‘look, we’re not asking that you suddenly love Black people, but we’re not going to win on the things that you care about if we don’t have everybody in the city. So all we’re asking is that you try working with them.’
By 1980, the entire organization endorsed an anti-racism position at the convention, and that included many white people who’d been active in the anti-busing movement. And it wasn’t because we preached to them, it’s because we found out what they cared about. And then we created a set of experiences where they worked – it’s like the old union movement did — side by side with Black families in a common struggle. And I don’t think it transformed them overnight, and I don’t think it ever transformed them to be totally not racist, but at least they saw racism now in a different light, and their populism overcame the racism.
And part of it was, Jon, Fair Share won things. I mean, it won a remarkable set of lower energy costs, insurance rebates in which people got checks, it won tax abatements, it had a series of victories, and there is nothing like winning to make people feel excited. And they began to feel part of something larger than themselves. And Fair Share had an internal life that reinforced that you were part of something larger.

JW: We’ve only got a minute or two left here. You finished your book just before Trump was elected. How do you understand where we are now?

MA: Where I think we are now is in a very, very desperate situation. The threat to the constitution, the threat to democracy, and the threat to decency is the greatest it’s been since the American Civil War. The challenge now is to organize. I believe there’s a majority that is anti-MAGA, but it’s got to be organized. It’s got to be in groups. It’s got to be thoughtful and strategic.

JW: Michael Ansara — his memoir, just published, is titled The Hard Work of Hope. Michael, your book meant a lot to me. Thanks for writing it, and thanks for talking with us today.

MA: Jon, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated it.